Dangerous History: ElDante' Winston

April 28, 2020: ElDante' Winston reminds us to look behind the façade of Renaissance architecture and question the context in which it was built. Listen to the interview here. The next time you pass through a European city gate, look around for the plaques and medallions that describe what once happened there. Piazzas were stages on which spectacles of power were performed; villas were fortifications; war and resource allocation have more to do with what architects we remember today than talent or genius. ElDante' wants architects and historians to follow their own insight and question traditional narratives that simply don't make sense. Don't try to map modern curations onto the past, learn to see the past as it was actually lived.

ElDante' Winston is a registered architect and PhD student in the History Theory and Criticism department. His area of focus is the 'Renaissance'/Pre-Modern period and the architecture created during this time period. ElDante' is interested in expanding the Westernized understanding of this period to include in the discourse the architecture of the East. His current research and dissertation topic centers on the intersection of violence and architecture in sixteenth-century Italy. Looking specifically at how war, executions, vendettas and the like reshape current perceptions of Italian Renaissance architecture. ElDante' holds a M. Arch from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Architecture from The Ohio State University. As an architect ElDante' has worked on projects from Chicago to China. 

Fra Carnevale, The Ideal City, 1480-1484, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore